Defending life from reason. Unamuno, Life 4.14
Unamuno returns to his theme that reason is deadly. In the battle for life, the Catholic church stands against rational limitations, which impose the necessity of death and thereby destroy our hope of personal immortality. When the church opposes rational teachings, like those of Galileo or Darwin or the priest Loisy, its motive is to keep the body of Christ from perishing, as it must do if it loses hope in personal immortality (which Unamuno regards as fundamental to the faith, against the judgment of rational Christians, Protestant or Catholic, who prefer ethics to eschatology). Theology exists, on Unamuno's reading, to offer the faithful rational methods for undermining and opposing reason, which on its own would destroy them, leaving them hopeless, helpless, dead before their time.
Es
lo vital que se afirma, y para afirmarse crea, sirviéndose de lo
racional, su enemigo, toda una construcción dogmática, y la Iglesia
la defiende contra racionalismo, contra protestantismo y contra
modernismo. Defiende la vida. Salió al paso a Galileo, e hizo bien,
porque su descubrimiento en un principio, y hasta acomodarlo a la
economía de los conocimientos humanos, tendía a quebrantar la
creencia antropocéntrica de que el universo ha sido creado para el
hombre; se opuso a Darwin, e hizo bien, porque el darwinismo tiende a
quebrantar nuestra creencia de que es el hombre un animal de
excepción, creado expreso para ser eternizado. Y por último, Pío
IX, el primer pontífice declarado infalible, declaróse
irreconciliable con la llamada civilización moderna. E hizo bien.
Loisy,
el ex abate católico, dijo: «Digo sencillamente que la Iglesia y la
teología no han favorecido el movimiento científico, sino que lo
han estorbado más bien en cuanto de ellas dependía, en ciertas
ocasiones decisivas; digo, sobre todo, que la enseñanza católica no
se ha asociado ni acomodado a ese movimiento. La teología se ha
comportado y se comporta todavía, como si poseyese en sí misma una
ciencia de la naturaleza y una ciencia de la historia con la
filosofía general de estas cosas que resultan de su conocimiento
científico. Diríase que el dominio de la teología y el de la
ciencia, distintos en principio y hasta por definición del concilio
del Vaticano, no deben serlo en la práctica. Todo pasa poco más o
menos como si la teología no tuviese nada que aprender de la ciencia
moderna, natural o histórica, y que estuviese en disposición y en
derecho de ejercer por sí misma una inspección directa y absoluta
sobre todo el trabajo del espíritu humano». (Autour
d’un petit livre,
páginas 211-212.)
Y
así tiene que ser y así es en su lucha con el modernismo de que fué
Loisy doctor y caudillo.
The
thing that affirms itself against reason here is life, which
uses reason, its enemy, to construct a defensive rampart of dogma
that the church maintains against rationalism, against Protestantism,
and against modernism (†).
The church is defending life. In that defense, it opposed Galileo—and
did so with good reason, as his discovery broke the general belief
that the world was created for man, broke it and made its failure
part of common human knowledge. The church opposed Darwin, and did so
with reason, again, for Darwinism tends to break our belief that man
is an exceptional animal, created to become eternal. Finally, Pius
IX, the first pope to be named infallible, declared his
irreconcilable opposition to what is known as modern civilization.
And he acted appropriately.
Loisy,
the excommunicated Catholic priest, put the matter well: "In
simple terms, I declare that the Catholic church and its theology
have not favored the scientific movement. Instead, they have done all
in their power to derail it, in various decisive moments. Catholic
teaching has certainly not associated itself with this movement or
done anything to accommodate it—as I can aver emphatically. The
behavior of Catholic theology past and present shows its conviction
of possessing, in itself, a science of nature, and a science of
history, along with a general philosophy of such things as arise from
these sciences. We might say that the dominion of theology and the
dominion of science, though they are on principle distinct and have
even been separated explicitly by the Vatican council, must not be
separated in practice. Everything real or actual happens more or less
as though theology had nothing to learn from modern science, whether
natural or historical—as though theology were in a position to
regard all the work of the human spirit on its own, with nothing
outside itself to inform its outlook" (A Little Book, pp.
211-212).
Theology
must take an independent position, like the one she takes against
modernism and Loisy, its learned champion. This is her role, her
doom.
---
(†)
The modernist movement within Catholicism dates back at least to the
mid-nineteenth century, when various Catholics—like
the French priest Alfred Loisy (1857-1940)—attempted
to reconcile the ongoing conflict between received dogma and modern
sciences. The first Vatican council convened under Pius IX in 1868
and concluded in 1870, publishing two constitutions, including the
one that affirmed papal infallibility. Loisy was excommunicated
later, in 1908, for teaching church history without appropriate
respect for traditional dogma. He went on to profess and teach
Christianity as a form of humanist ethics, following a path quite
close to that of certain rational Protestants. Some called Loisy the
father of modernism; hence Unamuno names him caudillo. For
Unamuno, the church's fight against modernism echoes its earlier
battles against Protestantism (in the early modern age) and rational
heresy (in medieval and late ancient times). All these opponents are
rational, and their reason, if taken seriously, must destroy the life
defended by the church (he says).